Television

Radio City pips rivals to the post in Warne news coverage

12 Feb, 2003 - 09:45 PM IST | By indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Radio City, the Star-fed FM radio channel managed to get around the forbidden terrain of live cricket coverage by being the first FM station in the country to report the Shane Warne drug test failure episode in its live hourly update on Tuesday morning.

The station claims to have been the first among rivals in reporting the incident, scoring brownie points in programming efficiency and speed. Programming around the World Cup on the FM radio stations has been a mixture of the trivial and the pedantic, ranging from celebrity wishes for the team to dredging of cricket archives over the last half century.

Radio City says it has live hourly updates with Joy Bhattacharya in South Africa, who broke the news of Warne's indictment soon after the media got wind of it. RED FM too has India Today sports editor Sharda Ugra too in South Africa, offering live glimpses into the matches and regular updates.

While the private radio stations have been restricted in their scope of airing live news coverage from South Africa, the

race is now on among the five private stations to beat each other in regular updates. Public broadcaster All India Radio, on the other hand, has hardly tom tommed the fact that live commentary of all the India matches is available on all the local AIR stations.

According to Radio City, Bhattacharya first reported Warne's drug test results on Tuesday morning and repeated the link in the afternoon. "We were committed from the beginning to ensure that the listeners get to hear the World Cup updates first on Radio City", says Radio City COO Sumantra Dutta.

Earlier this month, Radio City rolled out a comprehensive package on-air for its listeners for the World Cup cricket season. It started off with launch of the official World Cup Cricket album on the station featuring the current favorite song Khel Na re by Vasundhara Das and Sudesh Bhosle. Listeners across Radio City stations in Mumbai, Bangalore and Lucknow have the opportunity of winning exclusive official World Cup cricket merchandise.